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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2018-18385 json

Asciidoctor Infinite Loop vulnerability

published 8y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-qc9p-mjxm-j2wj , EUVD-2022-4946

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.3%
EPSS 2.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 83%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Asciidoctor in versions < 1.5.8 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop). The loop was caused by the fact that Parser.next_block was not exhausting all the lines in the reader as the while loop expected it would. This was happening because the regular expression that detects any list was not agreeing with the regular expression that detects a specific list type. So the line kept getting pushed back onto the reader, hence causing the loop.

Patch / fix

  • rubygems asciidoctor 1.5.8
  • asciidoctor asciidoctor 1.5.8
  • asciidoctor Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.5.8-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2018-18385

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2018-18385 updated cvss 0.0

rubygem-asciidoctor: Infinite loop in the #next_block method

  • Red Hat Virtualization 4 rubygem-asciidoctor
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

2.25% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 83% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/2888 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
rubygems asciidoctor
<1.5.8
1.5.8

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-835 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.